


Distant Stations

by thepointoftheneedle



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Happy Ending, What if soulmates still had to work to make a relationship?, psychologist Betty, writer jughead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:00:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23700460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepointoftheneedle/pseuds/thepointoftheneedle
Summary: It's sort of a soulmates AU but I can't quite buy the "happy ever after" of some of those.  I suppose it seems to me that it's less about who you’re with and more about who you are that makes a successful relationship.  In this Betty and Jug are fated to be linked but that doesn't mean that there aren’t  still a lot of hard yards to get through to make it work out.
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Comments: 38
Kudos: 130
Collections: 7th Bughead Fanfiction Awards - Nominees





	Distant Stations

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jandjsalmon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jandjsalmon/gifts).



> The title is from a song by The Mountain Goats. There’s a lyric that I love that kind of works its way into this.
> 
> I waited for you but I never told you where I was  
> It was you who taught me how to write these kinds of equations  
> I waited on the steps for you and I hid in the bushes whenever a car pulled into the parking lot  
> You taught me how to listen to these distant stations
> 
> I've dedicated it to jandjsalmon who is always one of my very kindest readers.

She could feel that he had just about reached his threshold for social interaction. There was a manic, antsy energy radiating off him so she pushed him some calm and he glanced across at her with a nod of acknowledgement. They would leave as soon as was polite. They had the advantage of being relatively new parents and that was an excuse they felt no compunction about using whenever the need arose. Still it was his book launch so he did need to be his charming self for a little longer. 

She watched him for a moment from across the room, still struck by how attractive she found him. He felt it and glanced back raising an eyebrow. He pointed to his chest in a “Who? Me?” gesture and grinned at her while he looked her up and down lasciviously. She blushed like she was a high schooler rather than an old married lady of thirty. A woman holding a dirty martini standing near her noticed the interplay and stepped towards her. “Oh you really are a kenshō couple aren’t you. I’d heard that, but loads of people claim to be and hardly anyone’s the real deal are they?” Betty smiled politely. Sometimes it was hard to keep up with the terms but kenshō was actually ok. Way better than the soulmate shit that people sometimes laid on her. She’d looked up kenshō when she heard it first about five years before. It was a zen word that implied a brief insight that might, with work, lead to real understanding. Obviously the original referred to spiritual enlightenment whereas now it was colloquially used to refer to the emotional telepathy experienced in some romantic relationships. The woman who was talking to her had clearly not looked it up as she demonstrated when she proceeded to relate Betty’s experience back to her, ignorantly. “You’re so lucky. God, normal relationships are so hard. It’s hard to find someone and then you never know what they’re thinking, if anything, am I right? Well you wouldn’t know of course. And then you have to work so damn hard at it. Well not you obviously. Fate just laid on a hot, brilliant man for you and made you be in love with each other, right. So lucky!” Betty had just begun to lose her temper when the hot, brilliant man in question was at her elbow calming troubled waters. He grinned at her and she smiled back. His sense of humour was a life saver.

Betty nodded serenely at her new friend. “Yes, that’s right. The universe just matched us up. I got very lucky.” She paused. She couldn’t just leave it like that. Sometimes Betty Cooper-Jones couldn’t resist throwing the grenade. “He’s incredible in bed too, and huge, you wouldn’t believe it. I mean like a horse.” She was still making a gesture with her hands to indicate what would have been a prodigious girth for an elephant, as Jug was dragging her away, choking with laughter now. 

“Betts, this is supposed to be a polite cocktail party. You can’t say that shit.”

“It just makes me mad when people think they know my life. Nothing good is easy, you know? Anyway you love it. That’s going to be a flattering rumour that never goes away. Famous author, Forsythe “hung like a horse” Jones. You should be thanking me.” He laughed all the way home in the cab and then tried diligently to live up to his reputation. 

Obviously their relationship hadn’t worked like the cocktail woman had imagined. Betty would always remember sitting on Polly’s bed that first day, her eyes still red and sore from crying. Her big sister put an arm around her shoulder and stroked her hair. “I’m so sorry Lizzybetts. It’s a shame that the first time was awful but that has to happen sometimes. We pick up their strong emotion and some of those are bad. It doesn’t mean it won’t be great next time. And it’s good that it’s strong. That’ll make it easier to find...him? Or her?”

“Him. And he’s thirteen too.” Betty nodded, sniffling into the balled up Kleenex in her hand. “How do I even know that Pol? It’s so weird.”

“I know and that’s so young for it to happen. It’s a lot. If I were you I’d keep it quiet from mom. Dad’s OK but she’ll make a huge big deal and want to know every detail. She was on me all the time when it happened to me the first time. And there wasn’t even a mystery to solve. Up to you but that’s my advice.”

“How did you know it was Jason, Pol? Did you see him in your head or...”

“No, did you see something? That’s way rare.”

“I’m not sure. Like not see-see but I sort of had a flash of something.”

“What? It might help you track him down.” Polly was curious now.

“It was just a kind of an idea, an empty closet, just metal hangers all pushed together with no clothes on them. And this terrible feeling. I don’t even know what to call it. Like so empty and sad and guilty. Like when Mom yells at me and I know I’m not what she hoped I’d be. When she doesn’t offer me the potatoes at dinner but a hundred times worse. Like he just wanted to die.” Betty was crying again now, the tears streaming down her face. “I just wish I knew where he was. I need to hug him.”

“Oh Lizzybetts. You will. One day you’ll be able to tell him that you wanted to help him. Maybe he can even feel it now.” She pulled Betty in to her side and held her. She started to speak again, hoping to distract her little sister, even if only for a moment. “My first one was at cheer practice. You know what Cheryl can be like, especially since she got held back, and she was yelling at me and being really mean but suddenly I just loved her so much. I understood her and felt sorry for her. I knew that she was in pain. I went over and hugged her. And then Jayjay was there and he knew that I was feeling exactly what he was feeling. We just stared at each other while Cheryl stood there between us. And that was it. We knew.”

“What did Cheryl do?” Betty asked, smiling a little for the first time since Polly had found her hunched on her bedroom carpet gasping and howling.

“She was pissed at not being the absolute centre of Jay’s universe but she was pretty happy to have both of us loving her so hard.” Polly smiled. “And this won’t matter to you for a while but Betty, when he touches me, it’s so amazing. I have my feelings and then his feelings and then him feeling my feelings and me feeling his...it’s what they call a feedback loop. Oh my God Betty. It’s unbelievable!”

“OK Pol, that might be TMI.”

Betty took her sister’s advice and said nothing to her parents about her first moment of telepathy or whatever this was. She read what she could about the phenomenon online but most of the information was speculative at best. She learned that it had first been studied fifty years ago. Then, it had been compared to something that had apparently always happened with some twins. One would experience something, perhaps a trauma or an illness and the other would feel an echo of what their sibling was experiencing. Then in the seventies it was noticed happening to people without a sibling link. At first it was people in very long term, committed relationships. Married couples in care homes would feel each other’s pain or fear or even joy. Often the people were old and their experiences weren’t taken seriously by most psychologists and scientists. Then, gradually, cases came to light of seemingly random people who seemed to glimpse each other’s most intense emotions. These people generally knew each other a little and often became friends and then lovers. There was growing speculation that they represented the tip of the iceberg. Because they knew each other, even if only a little, they could find their partner. If you just felt sad one day or had a terrible pain in your leg but your other half was in Mozambique or Shanghai you’d never know it was their feeling that you were experiencing. If, like Polly and Jason, you were able to recognise the one whose feelings you were tuned into and you fell in love the devotion was reflected back like an image reflected to infinity in two facing mirrors. Apparently, as Polly had implied, the physical aspect was transcendent. Betty didn’t feel like thinking about that. She was only thirteen and her “soulmate” as the romance magazine articles termed it, seemed like a very sad, damaged person. She had dreamed that she’d probably marry her best friend, Archie, who never had a miserable day. She’d thought that he would cheer her up when she felt low, as she often did. Somehow she knew that the person whose emotions she was wired into was as much the opposite of Archie as it was possible to imagine. And yet she longed to hold him, to let him cry against her shoulder, to wrap him in her arms until he felt safe and warm instead of cold and scared and worthless. It had not been an easy beginning.

Betty’s whole high school experience was dominated by both her struggles with her own anxiety and feelings of inadequacy and the terrible battles that her unknown “soulmate” was enduring. She would wake at night, shivering uncontrollably, her teeth chattering with a cold that her warm blankets couldn’t dispel because it was his cold. He was so terribly lonely all the time that she would suddenly burst into tears in French class and have to run out to the bathroom to sob. There was rage sometimes, so consuming that she had to pretend to have a fever and shut herself in her room. None of these tiny flashes were as intense and profound as the first experience. She wondered if there would be another real insight like that one or if it was an isolated occurrence.

There were tender moments too of course. For a while she kept pushing her hair back from her eyes only to realise that it wasn’t her hair, it was his. She took to wearing a tight ponytail so that whenever she felt it she knew it was him. Sometimes she stroked it back anyway, whispering “You need a haircut buddy.” She wondered if he felt it. As her body changed she felt him changing too. Her limbs felt too long, uncoordinated and awkward like a newborn giraffe. He was getting tall. Sometimes when she was dressing she felt his wonder at the way her breasts had begun to fill out the neat sweaters and she shook her head at his sheer boy-ness.

When everything fell apart for Polly she tried so hard to help her big sister but losing her soulmate seemed to break Polly’s whole identity. For the first time Betty realised the danger she was facing. While Polly and Jason’s bond had been quick to develop Polly only had moments of connection not the frequent glimpses that Betty had and she never had a visual flash. Still Polly's mind couldn’t stand the loss of her mate. Betty’s bond was established even younger, was even more intense and her complement, which seemed to emerge as the most accepted term at that time, seemed to live in constant danger and darkness. There was a feeling of physical peril all the time, she felt violence ever present in his everyday routines. Sometimes there was shame, as if he was doing something that he knew was wrong but couldn’t escape. There was a strange tingling feeling on the top of her arm, an S-shaped itch that was there all the time now. She had no idea what it meant. Would she lose him before she met him? Would it make her crazier than poor Polly? 

Betty read voraciously, devouring scientific papers and articles in psychology journals that might help her understand what was happening to her. It began her interest in the subject that would fascinate her from then on. It seemed that bonds could be formed between almost anyone if they established a close enough, honest enough relationship. It took time, years in fact, but people could choose a partner and build the connection with them. People like her, who just had the bond ready made, could reject it. All that was required was mental discipline. Every time a person felt the tug of their complement they just had to distract themselves, go for a run, listen to some loud music, watch an exciting film, mentally turn their back on it. Apparently after a while the bond withered and died. It appeared that every relationship needs to be nurtured, even the weird, uncanny ones. She thought about it carefully. If she couldn’t help him, and she didn’t see how she could, since she didn’t know who he was or where he lived, wouldn’t it be better to break the bond and find happiness with someone else? 

Her dad had an old FM radio out in the garage. Most of the time he had it tuned to some boring talk radio station where middle aged guys called in to the DJ to have arguments but sometimes, when he let her help him strip down an engine or showed her how the transmission worked, he’d let her retune to a music station. As she turned the dial, finding the station and then getting the reception as clear as it could be, she recognised her own interior experience. She was tuned in to his frequency. If she concentrated on what he was sending or if she tried to reach him, it was like that fine tuning she did to get the station perfectly clear. But she could just tune away, find another station. It might take a while, her dial might return to him naturally but it wouldn’t forever. She could replace the broadcast that made her sad and anxious with something easier to listen to.

She flirted a little with Archie and he asked her on a date. She accepted and dressed up, feeling excited but also horribly tense. She thought that might be him so she tuned away from it, undid her ponytail and curled her hair. She felt worse and worse all through the movie, fidgeting and squirming in her seat. She thought she felt him turning away mournfully inside her head and that was terrible. He’d been there, she realised, every moment. She felt like she was watching him walk away from her and it hurt. Archie walked her home and asked if he could kiss her. She smiled and said yes even though she wanted to scream but as his lips touched hers she felt the most terrible pain. In her head he was screaming and crying “Please, no, please.” She pulled away from Archie who was upset and embarrassed. She apologised. “I’m so sorry Arch. I thought this is what I wanted but it’s not. It really is me not you. Goodnight.” She fled into her house and up to her room, crying and trying to comfort him. “I’m sorry, forgive me. I won’t do it again. I didn’t know it would hurt you so much.”

She felt his words rather than hearing them in a way she couldn’t explain. “I’m sorry. I thought I could bear it. I want you to have what you want, who you want. I can try to stand it if you want him. I was surprised by the pain, by how much pain. I can try harder.”

Betty tried to send him reassurance. She imagined stroking back his hair, she imagined kissing his cheek. She thought about when she would stroke her cat Caramel, making her purr with contentment and slowly she felt him relax. Now she knew he needed her, that she gave him some small comfort in his darkness. His need for her did the same for her. To know that someone accepted the innermost depths of her, everything she was, made her incapable of turning away from him even if it cost her as it had cost poor lost Polly. It wasn’t like the radio after all. No-one would ever truly get her frequency like him. There would always be just the tiniest hiss and crackle with someone else and she found she wanted that perfect clarity no matter what the station was playing.

One shocking night when she was almost seventeen there was terror, defiance and horrible pain. There was the flash of a blade in front of her eyes and slicing agony wiping out the itch on her arm, then pain everywhere followed by nothing for two days. She thought he was dead. She thought that the nightmare had come to pass and she cried for his loss, like she had cried that first time but without Polly to comfort her. She feared for her sanity. Then abruptly he was back, hurting but alive. She hugged herself and whispered “Don’t ever do that again. I was so frightened. I love you. Take care of yourself. It hurts me so much.” She thought she heard his voice in her mind this time, the bond heightened perhaps by extremity. “I’m sorry. I love you too. Don’t hurt yourself anymore.” There was a picture of her own palms in her head. Crescent scars and the tension when she curled her nails into her own skin transmitted from his mind to hers. She knew now for certain that he was where her life was leading and she chose him in that moment. Whatever happened would happen to both of them.

The communication became a little clearer after the pain and horror of whatever had happened to him. At night she longed for him. If she touched herself she could feel him inside her head, murmuring “You’re beautiful. I love you.” Sometimes she’d feel him, excited, heart racing and she knew he was touching himself. “I love you. I can’t wait to be with you. I want you so much,” she thought and he would fall apart. Sometimes she felt the laugh he gave, delighted by her. It was a wonderful laugh.

As the end of high school came into view she sent for college brochures and leafed through them hoping for a sign. Nothing spoke to her. She knew he was poor, there was no other reason for the cold, the gnawing hunger. Could he even consider college? She thought he was clever. Sometimes when she wrote a paper for literature or history there would be an idea that she was almost sure wasn’t hers. She’d choose a word that she then had to look up, not sure how she knew it. She suspected it was him. She got used to murmuring “Thanks,” when it happened. Then she’d realise she was thinking about calculus in the middle of movie night with Kevin. She’d excuse herself to go to the bathroom and scribble equations on the back of her hand. At the edge of her mind she’d almost hear “You’re a genius. Love you.” and she’d smile to herself for the rest of the night. So, clever, but with some blind spots. She had blind spots too. When she tried to send him the name of her town or her school she could feel that nothing was going through. It was as if any ideas had to be strung onto a strong emotion to get through. She was with her guidance counsellor one Thursday morning, being berated for her tardiness with her application when she suddenly found herself asking excitedly about Amherst. She hadn’t even considered it before, hadn’t sent for a brochure but now Amherst was their goal, definitely. Luckily they had a great psychology programme and she wondered if he’d known, if it had factored in the choice. 

The first weeks of classes in Massachusetts were tough. She hadn’t felt him at all since the first day when her nervous butterflies seemed too intense to only be hers. She whispered “Calm down. You’ve got this.” and felt a warm weight around her shoulders like a hug. She tried to keep faith that he was there, he’d made it, and that they’d find each other but there were moments of dark doubt. Were they hers or his? She couldn’t tell anymore. Then, after a study group had run long she was leaving the library to walk back to her dorm when without warning her heart felt like it was exploding. She wondered in a weirdly detached way if she was having a heart attack. Then it got stranger. She could see herself in silhouette from behind, the sunset ahead of her, leaves turning orange in the last golden rays. There was her jacket, her book bag over her shoulder, there was her ponytail, swinging a little. And she felt her own surprise and disconcertion as well as a whole layer of other emotions that weren’t hers until abruptly they were, joy and relief mainly. And then she turned around and he was there. She could see him, through her eyes and then there were complexities over that. She could feel his reaction, amused, to how she saw him, tall, handsome, perfectly right. She felt how he saw her, beautiful, clean, precious, and she tried to object but felt him shutting her down. “You are!”. It was so complicated and overwhelming that she couldn’t catch her breath. He was there, grinning and holding his long arms wide. She ran back the way she had come, into those open arms and he held her. Her heart was pounding and so was his. She could feel both of them like twin suns in her chest, in perfect harmony. Her mind was filled with the words “At last!” When she looked up to say them, he was looking down saying them too.

It wouldn’t have mattered if he hadn’t been beautiful. He was hers and she was his but, as it happened he was so handsome that she felt a little overwhelmed and insecure. She liked that he was surprised by how much she liked to look at him. She felt him looking at her too. He was still a boob man. It was also very unnerving to have, kinda sorta, been intimately acquainted with him even though she didn’t know his name and had never touched him until this moment. “Hi,” he whispered into her hair.

“Hi, yourself.” she murmured into his chest.

“What’s your name? I could never work it out. No one really uses their own name to themselves do they. Ellie? Etta?”

“Betty, I know it’s weird. Elizabeth really but that’s what my mom calls me so…”  
“Yeah, sorry kid. She’s kind of terrible. I mean not as bad as mine, but close.” He was smiling at her now, holding her hands and looking at her palms where the scars were still faint silvery lines.

“Are you Doug? I thought that was it but it just doesn’t seem right now.”

“You’re going to have to know I guess. I’m sorry about it but it’s just one of the heinous crimes my parents have committed. I’m formally Forsythe Pendleton Jones...the third ...but you’ll be relieved to hear that everyone calls me Jughead. Jug to my friends.”

“Weirdly that works better than Doug. What now Jug?” 

“I have no idea. It’s a pretty strange situation. You hungry? I can’t tell if it’s you or me or both.” Betty nodded and he put an arm around her shoulders like it was the most natural thing in the world and she found that it was. “Come on, I know a great diner.”

Over burgers and milkshakes they pieced together lives that they had seen in tiny fragments. Her first flash of his life had been the day his mom deserted him, taking his sister and leaving him alone with his alcoholic father. He knew something terrible had happened to her sister but didn’t know what so she explained about Jason and the twins and Polly’s breakdown. He was horrified to imagine that kind of loss and he finally understood why she’d learned about breaking the bond.

He couldn’t stop smiling at her. “I feel like I know you totally but not at all. Like you’re my best and oldest friend and someone I’ve never met. I need to say you are, definitely, the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. And I’m sorry about creeping you out about the boobs. It was a very confusing time. I honestly wasn’t sure for a while if I wanted to touch your boobs or if I actually wanted boobs. All I knew was I was obsessed with them.”

“It didn’t creep me out. I struggled more with you not knowing how long your arms and legs were from minute to minute. That was weird.”

“Yeah, I was small for my age until the summer before sophomore year. I grew almost six inches in four months. Kept falling over. I swear I’d go to bed and when I got up the next day my jeans were too short.”

“Oh adorable. I wish I could have seen you.” 

Hearing about the trailer park, homelessness, gang life and violence made sense of what she’d felt. “I’m so sorry Betty. You must have wondered what the hell you were being dragged into. You could have broken it. I would have understood. But knowing you were there, knowing that you felt so tenderly towards me, even maybe wanted me, that’s what got me through it. I would have sunk without you, for sure. I used to think of you as my lighthouse. Like the seas were pretty stormy but I could navigate them because you were there, showing me the way.”

“You were there for me too Jug. When I wanted to hurt myself I could just find you somehow. It felt like you were holding my hands. Oh, and you were like a thesaurus in my head.”

“I used to imagine doing this.” He took both of her hands in his, holding them up to his lips and kissing them. No-one had ever done it before and yet it felt like the most familiar thing in the world. A sob caught in her throat and she looked at him with her eyes full of tears. 

“We’re going to do this aren’t we?” She asked, not even sure what she meant.

“If you mean am I going to fall even more in love with you and take you out on dates and try to touch the amazing boobs and hope to eventually seduce you and marry you and father your children and love you until I die…yep. Definitely doing this.”

She’d hoped, perhaps even expected, that once they met everything would be “happily ever after.” It wasn’t quite like that. There were lots of things she hadn’t known about Jug before they met physically for the first time even though she’d imagined that she knew him completely. He was outrageously attractive, he was funny in a dry, witty, self deprecating way, he was fiercely independent, he hated parties and big crowds, he was a brilliant writer, he was profoundly damaged by his childhood and he was a pleasure delayer. If he’d pressed the issue she would have left the diner with him the first time she’d met him and gone to one of their dorms and made love to him. The feelings were there already, she felt like the foreplay had started before either of them even knew what that was, they were committed to each other and had known each other forever. But Jug didn’t push it. He held her hand, kissed her hair when he walked her home and left her horribly frustrated outside her building, walking away whistling. Of course the show of insouciance didn’t play at all. “I can feel how worked up you are you know Jones. You can have no secrets from me!”

“Same Cooper. Maybe I’ll kiss your cheek next time if you play your cards right.”

“You’re weird.”

“You have no idea!” and his slim shadow disappeared around the corner of the building.

The flashes and moments and even snippets of internal monologue arrived more frequently. Sometimes she’d have to call him.“Just set a reminder on your phone Juggy. Stop saying “Buy peanut butter” to yourself. You’re driving me crazy.”

It was so great to get the full conversation rather than tiny, tantalising snippets. “OK but stop thinking there’s celli…whatever the hell it is, on your thighs. Your thighs are perfect and I won’t hear a word against them even in your head.”

“You’ve never even seen my thighs.”

“That’s all you know. I think motivation might play a part in what insights we get and I’m so motivated by seeing your thighs. Not as much as the boobs obvs but motivated like you wouldn’t believe. Hey, wait! Are you thinking about my dick right now? Ohhh you bad girl.”

She giggled and hung up. 

So they flirted and joked about sex but he wouldn’t take the next step. They kissed, they fooled around a little, but when things got hot and heavy he’d push himself away from her, gasping and flushed and sit on the floor rather than the bed. Eventually, after they’d been dating for three months she had to ask him directly. “What are we waiting for Jug? You’re it for me. You feel the same, I know you do. What’s wrong?”

He was silent for a long time but she waited. She could feel that he needed to tell her but he didn’t know where to start. “I’m scared Betts.” He looked up at her from where he was laying on her dorm room floor, trying to hide the erection that their kissing had manifested. “My mom and dad were like us, well a little like us. They had the same kind of shared emotion, maybe not the other stuff, the thoughts and images, but when those feelings go wrong it goes really wrong. The bad stuff spirals too you know. People get hurt. I got hurt. I want us to be really strong before it all goes to shit. And if I’m thinking with my dick I’m scared that I’ll lose focus.”

She hadn’t seen the fear until that moment. He’d buried it so deep that she hadn’t found it and she was shocked that he could do that. She didn’t think there was anything that she felt that he didn’t have access to. She’d known there was damage but now she saw it properly. He didn’t say “if it goes to shit” but “when.” And even at eighteen years old and crazy in love she knew there was difficult work to do if they were going to build a life together. She didn’t know how much work but she signed up for it anyway. She reached down from the bed and grabbed his shoulder. “Get up here Jug, no fooling around I promise. Just come here.”

He clambered back onto the bed and she held his head against her chest and stroked his hair and murmured words of comfort and gradually the tears came. “It’s ok Juggy. I’ve got you now. It’ll be ok. You’re safe now.” He cried it out, the fear, the abandonment. She saw it all clearly, felt it with him completely. He suspected it was his fault that his mom left, that he wasn’t a good enough son to be worth his dad taking care of him and so he felt that he deserved to be alone. There was guilt too. He’d needed the gang but he’d had to do things he was ashamed of and that made him feel that he didn’t deserve her. There was crushing insecurity too, that she should have been with someone else, that she wanted someone else but his neediness and whining had dragged her back to him against her will. 

She was almost overwhelmed by the feelings he’d been hiding, locking down, but the elation that she felt at breaking down the barriers between them transmitted to him and he smiled at her. “You still don’t hate me, do you? You don’t even think I’m weak. How can that be true?”

She smiled back and found that with a little mental shove she could send him her feeling of admiration and pride in him. She didn’t have words to say how she did it but he seemed to grasp the trick at once and he pushed her a spike of raw lust that made her gasp and grab his shoulder. “Oh my god Jug, where’s that coming from?”

“Oh that’s just my all day, everyday, base line unbelievably horny for you. Shall we go on a proper date and address it?”

He took her to a restaurant that made him uncomfortable and nervous. She scanned the menu and was horrified by the prices as he fiddled with his necktie. The tie made her feel like she was being choked. When the supercilious waiter came over, judging them and finding them wanting, Betty lost her cool a little. “Hi, just a moment please,” she said politely to him and took Jug’s hand across the table. “Honey, you don’t need to pay all this money to give me pretentious food and be patronised by this guy just to have sex with me. If you want you can have me next to a burning dumpster right now. I am the surest sure thing, so shall we skip this shit and you can take me somewhere so I can suck your cock instead?” She put her head enquiringly to one side as if she’d just asked him if he was going to have the chicken or the fish as his jaw dropped and the waiter blushed. Jug had lost the power of speech but fortunately they didn’t need it and they stood together and rushed out howling with laughter. 

“I can see in your head. How can you still surprise me? You’re the best girl in the world Betty Cooper. Do you really want to do it by a burning dumpster or what?”

She rummaged in her purse and brought out a hotel room key card and his eyes widened. “How the hell didn’t I see that?”

She grinned at him. “Women need to keep a little mystery Jones. Just enjoy it.” Actually her roommate Veronica had asked her what the occasion was when she came home with a new dress and she’d told her that she and Jug had a big night planned. V had resources and she’d waltzed into their dorm room when Betty was doing her make up and thrown her the card. 

“Consider it a selfish gift B. The sock on the door handle is so sub John Hughes teen movie. And, my precious virginal friend, it’s essential to help the first time along a little. Take it from one who knows.”

It was a considerate gift because despite her earlier bravado Betty knew she would have been embarrassed to check into a hotel with no luggage for one night. Angry she was a firecracker but without that spark she was shy and nervous. As it was they went straight to an elegant room where they ordered burgers from the room service menu and bounced on the bed in bare feet until they were breathless. After they’d eaten Jug took Betty’s hands and looked at her seriously. “I’m nervous Betts. I’ll probably be horrible at this. I don’t want you to be disappointed. But I want to make you happy so just tell me when I do it wrong and I’ll try to learn.”

Betty let him feel her desire and he looked surprised. “Girls feel horny too Jug. I don’t know what I’m doing either. V says the first time’s usually a washout anyway so let’s get onto the second and third as soon as we can.”

As they were warned the first time was a bust. Betty was both much too eager and nowhere near ready and after a moment of fumbling, gasping confusion they had only sticky sheets to show for their efforts. “God Betty, I’m so sorry. Christ that’s so embarrassing.” Jug was mortified but Betty, characteristically had already begun to analyse the problem. 

“Ok, couple of issues. First, that was totally my fault. Don’t be so quick to always take responsibility for anything that goes wrong. I was way too grabby. Also I think one of the problems was like what happened to me at graduation.”

“You came too soon at graduation?” He was very confused now.

“I was valedictorian right?” Betty began to explain.

“Of course you were. What else would I expect?”

Anyway, the point is there was a delay on the microphone. I actually couldn’t get my words out. What I was hearing and what I was saying were out of synch and I got all flustered. My friend Kevin knows about that stuff, he’s a theatre kid, so he jumped up on stage and sorted it. Life saver.”

“Ok, cool story but how does that help with our sex life?”

“Well, we’re feeling our sensations and each other’s and then feeling each other feeling each other, if you follow me. It’s out of synch and it’s getting us confused.”

He smirked. “I was feeling you in lots of ways. Hey, what if we just do one thing at a time. Like if I touch you and you don’t do anything then I’d feel what I’m feeling and how it makes you feel too. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Well it sounds like fun anyway. Lie back. Let’s try.”

Eventually that night they managed to relieve each other of their pesky virginity but there was definitely room for improvement. They set to work on that diligently. 

On their one year anniversary she came home from class to find their apartment empty. She knew that he hadn’t forgotten the occasion because she’d been feeling his anticipation rising all week but she’d turned away a little to let him have the surprise he was planning. Now she sat on a corner of the bed and opened up her mind to him completely. The communication seemed to get easier the more time they spent together and she saw a glimpse of what he was seeing, a familiar gold coloured bedcover, two glasses on a nightstand, a hotel bathrobe. She changed quickly, grabbed her toothbrush and let herself out of the apartment. She’d recognised the same hotel room they had on that first night and when she tapped at the door he opened it and enfolded her in his arms. “I wanted a do-over. Is it OK?”

“It’s perfect and you’re perfect and I love you. Happy anniversary.” She kissed him, trying to show him with her passion all that he meant to her. He responded as they had learned, slowly, focusing on their shared experience rather than his or hers. He walked her back to the bed and laid her down gently. 

“I love you Betty. I’ve loved you since I was thirteen years old. I loved you before I knew your name, before I knew how beautiful you are, before I knew how unbelievably smart and good you are. I’ve no idea how I got this lucky but knowing that you love me too means everything to me.” He opened up what he felt to her and she gasped at the tenderness and expanse of his love for her. She reciprocated, showing him her feelings and tears sprang into his eyes as he saw her devotion and admiration for him, for surviving and being a strong, good man in spite of all of it. He was thinking about unbuttoning her shirt so she thought about him lifting her breasts from the cups of her bra. He smiled and did just that. When he placed his lips on her breast she began to breathe more heavily. She was never sure if her sensitivity was why he was so interested in her breasts or if his fascination with them made her more sensitive but it seemed a virtuous circle. He brushed his long, beautiful fingers over her and took her nipple into his mouth, stroking her with his tongue. He unclasped her bra and threw it to the floor with her shirt and massaged one breast while he paid attention to the other with his mouth. She felt how much he loved to devote himself to this but she began to want more and he unbuttoned his shirt in response to her growing need. Now she was able to touch the smooth, taut muscle of his chest, to run her thumbs over his nipples as he did the same to her so he couldn’t tell what was her sensation and what was his. He started to whine in his throat and she dragged a finger down his belly to the buttons of his jeans, popping them one after the other. She was breathing hard now and it didn’t matter whose excitement it was. 

He struggled out of his jeans while she unhooked her skirt and kicked it off her legs, not breaking their contact. She reached down, her hand in his boxers stroking him. He inhaled steadily trying to get the control that he hadn’t managed that first night and eased her panties down her legs.

She knew what he was going to do before he moved his head down over her belly and her stomach clenched with anticipation. He was one of a very few men who knew what a woman felt when her lover went down on her. It gave him a distinct advantage over the common herd. Fortunately he used his gifts only in the service of getting Betty Cooper off. She lay back on the bed and gave him the gift of really focussing on her pleasure because then he felt it too. She was open to him, body and mind, and she let him understand how much she trusted him in that moment. When he put his mouth on her she felt the pleasure, of course, but to feel his reverence for her, that he genuinely found her beautiful and her response to him thrilling, intensified the sensation until she lost all grasp of where she ended and he began. It wasn’t him and her, his mouth on her, anymore. There was just them, and joy and experience and love cycling around and around in dizzying whorls. Her orgasm made her cry out but he was ready and put his hand across her mouth before they scandalised the entire fourth floor of the hotel. He kissed her belly and her hips as he travelled back up her body, whispering that he loved her, that he lived for her, that he was hers always. 

She felt soft and warm in the afterglow of her climax but she also felt the tension of his arousal and so she began to move her head down his body but paused when she realised that he didn’t want that. She looked into his eyes. He always wanted that. But not tonight apparently. The thought was too complex for her to catch it just from his emotions so she raised an eyebrow at him instead. “I don’t know,” he replied to her unasked question. “I just want to be inside you, I feel like I want to be joined to you, like we’re one being. I feel so close to you right now I want be there physically.”

She smiled and put her hand on him, guiding him as he held his weight off her on one elbow. As he thrust into her, gently, slowly, she felt every aspect of the movement. It was reunion rather than union, this was how they were meant to be. Together they could be what neither of them could be alone. In the past she had been scared that she would lose the ability to function without him just as Polly had when she lost her Jason but it wasn’t true that being with him made her less herself. She was more fully herself with him. If the worst happened and she lost him, the glimpses he’d shown her of who she could be, convinced her that she would survive. When it was possible though she would always choose him if she could. And she knew with certainty that he would always choose her, not because he was grateful to her or depended on her but because she helped him be fully his irascible, funny, impatient, soft, vulnerable, guarded, beautiful self. He moved inside her gently, insistently and then he moved his hand down to touch her, all the while kissing her throat and humming against her skin. The building tension was gradual but he had faith that it would get her there step by step. He began to tremble a little as he thrust against her and she stroked her hands through the soft dark waves of his hair. “I love you,” she whispered, “You’re so good to me. I’ll always love you.” Her words released something in him and he began to stutter against her, stroking her and murmuring nonsense against her breast and then they were falling together, around and over each other, clasped together, one falling, spiralling creature in an endless embrace.

Later they ate the customary room service burgers and drank champagne that they weren’t yet old enough to buy, toasting Veronica for her mysterious “contacts” who had supplied it. She would always think of it as one of their perfect nights, but a perfect night that they’d earned with a year of learning about each other and caring for each other.

Gradually life changed. Their generation was graduating , finding jobs and meeting the partners who fulfilled them. Jughead had supported them with his writing even before graduation, affording them the luxury of an off campus apartment and lazy summer days spent building the relationship they wanted rather than working tedious minimum wage jobs. After graduation Betty was able to secure a teaching position in Massachusetts at a community college and then later moved back to Amherst with tenure. She introduced Veronica to Archie and sparks flew. They had a connection that only strengthened over the years despite numerous fiery arguments and tearful near break-ups. In their mid twenties the wedding invitations began to arrive, starting with Veronica and Archie’s, and their summers were filled with road trips to destination ceremonies and bachelor/ bachelorette weekends. 

Jug interrogated her feelings without words. Was she jealous? Did she want this? She looked into his eyes to be sure he understood what she said. “I’m yours, you’re mine. I know, you know. Everyone we care about knows. What’s to be gained? It just feels irrelevant to who we are. Sort of play acting about the most important thing in my life.”

Then the world began to demand things of them. They bought a house and the legal papers were horrendous because they weren’t married. They needed wills which were more complex because they weren’t married. Then Betty woke up one morning feeling weird. They had been thinking about a baby and she’d stopped using birth control a few weeks before but she hadn’t imagined anything would happen so soon. The test was positive and they were going to be parents. “Jug, there are going to be hideous forms. I know it doesn’t matter to us but shall we just get a licence and get this done?”

“Well the romance of your proposal sweeps me away Cooper. Is there a ring at least?”

Betty bit her lip and shook her head. She supposed it wasn’t really the way to ask someone to marry you. Fortunately he was more prepared and he rummaged for a moment among his socks and produced a ring box. He went down on one knee in his boxers, shaving foam still on his cheek and asked her to marry him like an ardent suitor. She said yes and they were married with two random witnesses at City Hall the next week. 

She had no words for the day their daughter was born. The pain, the fear, the happiness, the terror, the love were all too much to comprehend but he was there for every moment of it and if a man ever said he knew what his partner went through they ought to talk to Jug. He couldn’t believe that she was able to endure it without going mad but he loved her even more because she did.

So the woman at the launch party was definitely right. Betty Cooper-Jones had gotten incredibly lucky. The universe had chosen a perfect man for her. But kenshō didn’t make everything easy. The work still had to be done, with courage and compassion and the determination to keep at it when there were difficulties and disappointments. Betty’s challenges were different from other people’s but she had screamed in agony at thirteen years old when it felt like her heart was being ripped from her body, had been scared that the only man she would ever love wouldn’t be able to find her, had to work on a relationship that began in trauma. As she had muttered as they left the launch party, “Nothing good is easy.”


End file.
